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His site is new, but he has excellent content production capabilities.

My question is, in terms of optimizing the page (the title and url) for these keywords would you focus on the highest volume keyword.

In this case the highest volume keyword is "fat burning foods" however is the most competitive and dominated by high domain authority sites (50+ vs. clients site which is around 30). Thus its highly unlikely he will rank for that keyword for quite a while.

But for the keyword term "best fat burning foods" the competition is alot less in terms of DA and other factors but volume is smaller with 1900 hits a month.

So would you optimize the page (the title and url) for "best fat burning food" or would you optimize thinking about the long-term and eventually ranking the keyword "fat burning foods".

My thinking would be to optimize the page for "fat burning foods". And that the benefits of optimizing (url and title) for "best fat burning foods" isn't ideal for the long-run.

I usually start optimizing for the long tails (many time the competitive kw is in the long-tail phrase) before competitive keywords. What is crucial (as you know) is having a compelling landing pages and begin building the funnels to these pages.

Can your client's business survive the next year or two with little or no traffic while you go after the big keywords? I'm guessing no. 100 actual visitors a month is better than 10,000 theoretical visitors that never materialize. Start out targeting attainable keywords. Once those are secure and your client is getting decent traffic, move on to more challenging keywords.

I would use the keyword that you want to rank for in the end (the competitive keyword) as URL and Titles and use the less competitive keywords in the content. If you use the keywords you don't want to rank for in the end in your URL and etc., once the website has been around and start getting daily visitors, I don't think you want to change the URL to the more competitive keyword.

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